Tuesday, 1 September 2015

Decolonizing critical thought and rebellions II

The construction of
another world in Latin America, according to Raúl Zibechi, is being carried out
by means of organizations not state-centric nor hierarchical, which at times
don’t even have permanent leadership teams and, as a consequence, tend to
overcome bureaucracy, a traditional, elemental and very old form of domination.
Women and youth play a new role in these new “modes of doing.”

In a first time criticism
of the progressive governments, Zibechi identifies that, despite differences,
all the processes have in common the continuity of the extractive model, either
open sky mining, hydrocarbons or mono-crops. “In all the cases it’s about the
production of commodities, the mode that neoliberalism assumes today in the
region,” as well as the expansion of social policies that seek to neutralize
the movements and buffer or impede conflict. “The map of the progressive governments
and those of the left would have to establish a difference between those
countries in which social action made the political system enter into crisis,
like Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, and those like Brazil and Uruguay, where
stability has predominated, Argentina being in an intermediate situation.” Upon
questioning the principal dangers and benefits that the arrival in government
of the progressive parties implies, Zibechi makes a remark, in my judgment
transcendent, and starting from three scenarios: “The interstate relationships,
in other words, the question of the governments, the relationship between
movements and states, that is to say, the question of emancipation and the
relationship between development and living well (buen vivir) [1], that is,
post-development. If we look at the state question, the existence of the
progressive governments is very positive, because within them is at play the
relationship with the United States and with the big multinationals of the
north, the crisis of imperialist domination that these governments accentuate.
But, if we observe the question of emancipation or development, these
governments have represented a step back. The problem is that there are social
and political forces that cannot have any horizon other than being government,
which converts them into administrators of the State.”

In the specificity of
Latin America, Zibechi emphasizes that on the one hand “we have an official
society, hegemonic, with a colonial heritage, with its institutions, its ways
of doing things, its justice and all that. On the other hand, there is another
society that has property in the remote rural areas and is organized into
communities and also in the expanded urban peripheries. This other society has
other ways and forms of organizing, has its own justice, its own forms of
production and an organization for making decisions parallel to or at the
margin of the established one.” Our author maintains that indigenous practice
questions various aspects of western revolutionary conceptions and denounces
that only the State-centric can be theorized, coinciding with authors like
Leopoldo Marmora, who in the middle of the 1980s made note of the Eurocentric
roots of Marxism in the treatment of the national question and in the concept
of “peoples without history.” “There are various themes that the Indian
movement puts on the table. The first is their conception of time, the
present-past relationship. The second is the idea of social change or
revolution, the Pachakutik… The third is related to rationalism and to the
relation between means and ends, which involves the ideas of strategy and
tactics, as well as the question of program and of plan.” In all these themes
and processes, the role of the intellectual is important. Zibechi rejects being
defined as an intellectual, even in the terms in which Lenin and even Gramsci
plated them, and he prefers being called an activist/militant and
thinker/educator, which in any case doesn’t stop him from being intellectual.
He maintains, aptly, that many of the ideas of those who work in the movements
are the patrimony of many people. “If people are at the center of the movement,
then the intellectual tends to be one more in the movement… therefore the
intellectuals must also be in movement and move away from that place of being
at the top of the people.”

Zibechi considers that
the autonomic anti-systemic movements started a new era of social struggles or
classes that is in its first phases. This new era is one of the
self-construction of a world, with the necessity of passing over the taking of
state power, and concentrating on the territories where these new worlds are
being constructed. The most evident case is that of the Zapatista Caracoles,
where forms of supra-communitarian power have been constructed, like the Good
Government Juntas that each unites hundreds of communities (although the
federalism in Kurdistan also shows an unpublished experience in this
conflictive region of the world). The Zapatista experience –Zibechi asserts– is
a historic achievement that had never existed before in the struggles of those
below, except for the 69 days that the Paris Commune lasted and the brief time
of the Soviets before the Stalinist state reconstruction.

The reappearance of the
EZLN, according to Zibechi, “combines historic positions (among which one would
have to emphasize the rejection of the electoral scenario and the construction
of homogenous and centralized organizations) with new developments that imply a
different relationship with its support bases outside of Chiapas and, above
all, a novel mode of intervention in popular sectors, consistent with
demonstrating what they have been capable of constructing which, in reality, is
teaching a distinctive and different path for transforming the world.”

In our author’s judgment,
the Zapatista discourse recuperates the tradition of anticolonial resistance
defended by Frantz Fanon, who emphasizes the existence of “two zones,” that of
the oppressor and that of the oppressed, “those of above and those of below.”
At the same time, Zibechi distinguished Zapatismo from other movements starting
with integral autonomy, which leads them to reject aid and social policies from
the government; the construction of organs of power on three levels, different
from the forms of State power, inspired in the community; being a movement of
youth and of women, and being consequently anti-capitalist.

[1] Buen Vivir – (Good
living or living well, in English) is rooted in the cosmovision (or worldview)
of the Quechua peoples of the Andes, sumak kawsay –or buen vivir, in Spanish–
describes a way of doing things that is community-centric, ecologically
balanced and culturally sensitive. In the concept of buen vivir, the individual
lives in harmony with community, nature and culture.

Frantz Fanon

1925 - 1961

This Blog

This blog contains resources directly related to Frantz Fanon's life and work, the secondary literature on Fanon and other resources useful for engaging Fanon's ideas here and now. Some of what is here comes from, or relates to, a particular set of ongoing discussions around Fanon's work in Grahamstown.